Dark Mode Offers Huge Battery Life Boost

Users of smartphones with OLED screens can save up to 60% of their battery life by choosing dark colored themes.

(CCM) — Android users can give their OLED-screen smartphones a huge battery life boost by doing nothing more than using Android Pie's Dark Mode. With the screen set to full brightness, using Dark Mode rather than the normal display mode can result in power saving of as much as 60%, according to a Verge report.

The reason for this significant power saving is that individual pixels consume less power when set to display dark colors rather than light ones. Pixels set to black consume almost no power at all, the report adds.

Google highlighted this at its Android Dev Summit held in Mountain View, CA, this month. At the event it showed a slide which reveals that a smartphone displaying black at maximum brightness uses a little over 50mA of current draw, compared to a little over 100mA for red or green. Blue requires over 200mA of current draw, while white at maximum brightness requires more than 300mA.

The figures have important implications for app design. Many of Google's own apps use large areas of white, and that is unlikely to change in the near future as they follow the company's own Material Design style guidelines.

But the company has already enabled YouTube and Android Messages to display in Dark Mode, and it plans to bring the feature to the Phone app and mobile Google Feed soon, according to the report.